With Brandy

While it’s the season for summer stone fruit I like to use them as much as possible. The basis of this week’s recipe was given to me by an old friend Jane. Her cousins Rob and Nicki, the owners of Rockburn Orchards, had raved about the way Jane roasted their Moorpark apricots for dessert. I […]

I think many of us think that a terrine is a difficult thing to make. It definitely isn’t. If you can make a meat loaf then you can do this. The result is impressive and delicious. Try making one for Easter. Teamed with a loaf of fresh bread, a platter of Salash’s smoked meats, chutney, […]

Last week customers raved about our chef Lou’s slow cooked goat dish. No doubt partly because of the liberal quantity of Madeira involved and the fact that goat is a really flavoursome meat. If you can’t quite face it, use lamb instead. Our stallholder Deidre sells wild goat or in Auckland you can buy it […]

Last week for our family dinner on my mother’s birthday I decided to cook duck. That’s pretty usual for a family celebration but this time I tried a new recipe from a book, published in 1982, on the cooking of south west France that I bought a few weeks ago. The recipe is very easy […]

This French classic is our most popular bistro dish. The acid in the orange sauce acts as a balance to the fat in the duck. I’ve done a little research and found that a recipe for wild ducklings with bigarade (bitter orange) sauce first appeared in a French cooking book in 1828. The recipe stated […]

It’s thought to originate in Burgundy where cockerel was cooked in red wine, hence the name. I imagine the birds were large, several years old and needed to be slowly cooked for hours. This is one of my favourite meals as it’s flavoursome and quick. Ingredients (serves 4): 8 chicken thighs – skin on, bone […]

I’d never cooked pheasant till last week when I bought one from Churchill Meats. Not knowing what to do with it, I consulted my very old copy of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. Using inspiration from two different recipes, the following is the result. The pheasant was similar to chicken in some ways but more […]